Book: Counterpoint

But I always forget, ' she said.
- Just what you ought to remember. With you it happens every time, it can't be accidental. You always remember what you want to forget.

He was like a bear, which smell of honey, despite all his fear, lured to the camp of the hunter, like a lover, ready to meet face to face an armed and outraged husband and the divorce process, if only to spend a few minutes in the arms of the beloved.

The human phrase consists of two hundred million parts. The noise says that the statistics and says nothing to the artist.

Noble ends justify dishonorable means.

- Life is given to you too easy, - he explained, - you live by instinct. You are by nature know how to do - like insect when it emerges from the pupa. It's too easy, too easy. He shook his head. - You have not earned your wisdom; you do not even know that it is possible to live differently.
- In other words, Mary said, - I'm a fool.
- No, you're a woman.

You should never Express in words his knowledge of the impending misfortune, not what fate is, so to say, the model on which it will be able to shape future events. Always remains some kind of vague hope that if not called by the name of impending misfortune, that misfortune might not happen.

- Try to be a little more modern.
- I prefer to be human.

But the debauchery is so boring, so absolutely and hopelessly dull that only exceptional people, endowed with a rudimentary intelligence and an exaggerated appetite, able to actively enjoy them or actively believe in his sinfulness. The majority of libertine debauchery, not because they enjoy it, but because it is difficult to get along without it. Habit makes pleasure in the boring everyday need. A person who is used to women or vodka, Smoking or flagellation, as hard to abandon my vices as to live without bread and water, even if we commit sin, gives him no more pleasure than to eat a crust of bread or a drink of water from the kitchen faucet. Habit kills the same as the sense of sin, and the enjoyment of them. Things that seemed exciting at first, because they are vicious, after a number of repetitions become morally indifferent. They even inspire some disgust, because most "vicious" actions leads to a state of physiological depression; but a sense of sin is obliterated because these things are too ordinary.

- You are asked to be only human. Man, okay? Not an angel and not a devil. Man is an acrobat on a tightly stretched rope. He walks carefully, trying to keep his balance, holding a pole, one end of which consciousness, intelligence, spirit, and the other with the body, instinct and all that we have of the unconscious, the earth, strange to ourselves. He tries to keep his balance. It is devilishly difficult. And the only absolute, which it is not able to know is the absolute of perfect balance. The perfect absoluteness of relativity. From the point of view of the mind is a paradox and nonsense. But any true, real, living truth from the point of view of logic makes no sense. And from the point of view of living truth nonsense is logic. Choose what you like better, logic or life. A matter of taste. Some people prefer to be dead.

The world is a haven perverted idiots.

You should not go against his tastes and inclinations. What good is a philosophy if its main premise is not a reasonable justification for our own feelings? If you are not experiencing religious emotions, to believe in God is absurd. It's still like to believe that oysters are delicious, while you from the soul gate.

- The art cannot be taken too literally. - He remembered he said his sister's husband, Philip Quarless, when one evening they talked about poetry. Especially when it comes to love.
Even if art truly is? asked Walter.
- It can be too truthful. Without impurities. Like distilled water. When the truth is the only truth and nothing more, it is unnatural, it becomes an abstraction that does not correspond to nothing real. In nature to a significant always mixed with something irrelevant. Art affects us because it is purified from all the minor details of real life. No Orgy is not so exciting as pornographic novel. Pierre Louis: all girls are young and perfectly composed; there is nothing stopping to enjoy: no hiccups or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollection of an unpaid bill or unwritten business letter. All sensations, thoughts and feelings that we receive from works of art, pure - chemically pure, he added with a laugh, not moral.

It seemed to him that love is the conversations that love is spiritual communication. This is true love. Sexual life is only one of the everyday trifles, inevitable because human beings, unfortunately, have bodies; but to reckon with it as little as possible. Passionately pure and accustomed to translate their passion in the seraphic spirituality, he admired the refined and peaceful purity, which Marjorie comes from an innate coldness and reduced viability.

"Oh, why can't she leave me alone?" He is passionately, intensely desire it the more ardently, that he suppressed the desire it. (For he dared not to show it; he regretted it, he was good to her, no matter what; he was unable to outright, blatant brutality - he was cruel only from weakness, against his own will.)